Friday, January 6, 2017

13 CAMERAS (2015) [Paul's Review]

Ryan’s marriage is falling apart.His wife is pregnant and can’t eat swordfish,
but guess what he brought home for their dinner party? And he’s late for the dinner anyway, because
he was busy getting busy with his pretty assistant.He confides in his friend Paul, and, wouldn’t
you know it, Paul tells his wife who turns around and tells Ryan’s wife. So the next thing Ryan knows he’s out on his
porch with nothing but a bag full of clothes.And, just when you think Ryan has hit rock bottom, the mistress-assistant
turns up bound and gagged in his basement.It all looks awfully swordfishy for Ryan.How is he going to wiggle out of this one?

It’s a solid set-up for a thriller, but unfortunately for 13 Cameras, that previous paragraph is
not the set-up, but the whole movie.And
though it could be told in a single awkward dinner party evening, it takes a
whole hour and a half of your life and weeks of the characters’ lives to get
out.And once it’s out, Brad is promptly
brained by a ballpeen hammer.The hand
on the handle of that hammer belongs to their creepy, mouth-breathing landlord
whom they met when they moved in! A few
minutes later, the credits roll and that’s that.

13 Cameras tells
two stories at the same time.In one, Ryan’s
marriage is falling apart.In the other, their landlord is spying on them through tiny surveillance cameras. Sometimes he comes by the house when they’re
gone and installs cameras in the basin of the toilet and then uses their
toothbrushes.Eventually he kidnaps the
assistant and keeps her hostage in the basement of his rental house while Ryan and Claire are still living in it, which
seems like a really bad idea except as a contrivance to make it seem like the
two stories are related by putting them in the same house.It’s two stories on two stories!

Thus, with the landlord, we watch the dull and predictable demise of a doomed marriage between a heartless dickbag and a witless pregnant waif. When the landlord attacks them in the last fifteen minutes, they’re all like WTF
since they didn’t even know the landlord was even a character in the movie of
their lives.I was so
relieved that the whole thing was coming to an end that I didn't even care that the cameras aren't a factor in either of the two stories or
that I don’t know a whole lot about the landlord beyond "garden-variety heavy-breathing pervert" (to the movie's credit though, this is something the
actor, Neville Archambault, does reallywell).

13 Cameras mildly
fulfills the obligatory voyeurism-nudity expectation with a few shots of Ryan’s
mistress in the shower.We see her naked
torso while the movie cuts back and forth to the creepy landlord googly-eyeing
her delicate parts on his PC.Interestingly
though, when the wife, Claire, takes a shower, he also watches her, but this
time only through the cameras that give a tight-framed shot of her face.It’s refreshing how the landlord respects
the terms of the actresses’ contracts.

With the exception of Archambault's lumbering creep, the performances are fairly shallow, with PJ Moncrief succeeding perhaps too well in making the audience detest Ryan.The characters are unlikeable and unrelatable, probably owing to the
fact that they don’t talk human talk and seem either pointlessly mean or
annoyingly helpless.The two exceptions
might be the mistress, who seems understandably self-hating for getting
involved with Ryan, and the friend Paul, who is annoyed that he ever became friends with Ryan
in the first place. The big thing I couldn't get past, however, was the two-plots problem. But this is really difficult to explain without developing far-flung analogies.

It begins with these statistics of dubious value in the opening placards.

From those, you think that this movie is going to be about the
invasions of privacy and dangers of undetected surveillance.But then the cameras don’t really do anything—it’s not like the creepy
landlord uses them to terrorize his victims—it’s just, like, what he watches
when he’s chilling at his pad and no one’s the wiser.

Let’s put it this way, the fact that someone
is watching Ryan and the fail parade
of his marriage is disturbing in a similar way that bed mites are disturbing.Throw up a couple placards about all the
microorganisms that live in our beds and eat our dead skin.Millions!In our beds!Every night!It’s a little unsettling.So then the movie starts and we watch Ryan
and his mistress and his wife going about their affect-less parody of
suburban life. And every so often the film cuts to microscope shots of bed
mites, eating cells of dead flesh, and then back to them talking in bed or
sleeping or banging or what not.What
they’re doing in bed is not the point.The point is that they don’t even
know that the bed mites are in there with them!Icky, sure, but not really thrilling.

That is, Ryan and his self-hating admirers don’t have a
camera problem, they have a psycho pervert landlord problem.But they don’t even know about that problem
until the very end of the movie.

Another analogy? Sure, why not. Imagine a movie that begins with
placards about the dangers of choking on walnuts.Millions of walnuts are sold every day, the
placards tell us.Hundreds of people
have choked on walnuts and other hard grains since 2005!Got it?

And then the movie starts, and you watch Ryan feebly try to
deceive his pregnant wife who is clinging desperately to both her marriage and
her belly.Cut to
Claire buying groceries, and slow-motion zoom in on the checker’s hand as he
slides a bag of walnuts across the scanner.Watch out girl!But, naïve and
undeterred, Claire just goes about her day—she doesn’t know that her husband is
cheating on her, and she doesn’t know about the legumes of terror in her
grocery bag! Dialogue happens: why are
you late for dinner?Lots of
traffic.Whose panties are these?I don’t know, not mine.Oh, ok, I just found them, and, say, do you
want to decorate the nursery with me?

A few minutes in
though, the music gets creepy, they both go to sleep and the camera pans through
the darkened and empty house to focus on . . . a dish of walnuts!This continues throughout the movie, which is
basically a soulless and clunky domestic drama intercut with shots of the walnuts.One time, Claire even picks up the walnut and
is about to put it into her mouth when she’s distracted by her phone.She drops the walnut, and it rolls under the
couch.The camera follows it.The walnut rolls to a stop and abides.Waiting.It’s a metaphor or something.

Tension builds, Claire figures out that he’s having an
affair?How?Because her friend tells her (how’s that for
clever denoument?).And this all unravels
in between even tighter, closer, bigger shots of the walnut under the
couch.Until, at the climax, Claire
collapses by the couch, “how could you?” she asks, and one of her hands knocks
the walnut out from under the couch.It
rolls to a stop between Brad’s feet.He
picks it up absently.He cracks it in
the nutcracker.It’s all he has left,
this dry morsel of bitterness.Claire
watches as he brings the kernel to his mouth.Is this it?

And then a large figure comes flying through the door with a
ballpeen hammer, kills Brad with it and yells menacingly at Claire.Who is it?From the close-focus shot of the walnut lying, as self-satisfied as a
walnut can look, in a puddle of Brad’s blood, the camera pans up to reveal . .
. the check-out guy from the grocery store!It was him all along!

Nuts, man.

Questions for Joe:

1.Were there really 13 cameras?JD: Holy shit, dude, I still can't believe it was the check out clerk.

2.The cop in the final scene has a band-aid on
his face.Why?JD: It could have been a shaving cut. Jesus Christ, how many people do razors cut every day? You know I have one of those in my HOUSE? What if my cat got a hold of it?

3.The landlord, at one point in the movie,
touches Claire’s belly and says “girl.”But at the end of the movie we discover that she had a boy.Should you be embarrassed if you guess at the sex of an unborn child and get it wrong?JD: Oh wow, he did get it wrong. What is the point of that? He should have told her a name he liked. "You should name her Walnut." Expecting parents hate that. Not as much as getting hit with hammers, but still.

4.Why doesn’t the landlord keep his captives in
the soundproof dungeon he has at his apartment?JD: Well, if the married couple found her he could always turn it back on them and dangle the security deposit in their faces. He could also threaten to expose Ryan's affair. And if Ryan were like "Prove it, big shot" oh boy howdy, would he have the proof RIGHT there.

5.Why doesn't Claire confront Ryan about the strange panties she finds in her laundry?JD: Were those strange panties? I didn't pick up on that. I was just sitting there, breathing heavily and looking uncomprehendingly at a woman looking at panties. Fuck. I wonder if the pervert landlord picked up on that detail. Did he do a better job of watching the movie than I did?6. How do the filmmakers know that 8,000 people were watched without their knowledge in their homes last year? Does it count if it's just your cat giving you the ol' kitty-cat death stare while you're sleeping?JD: Given the dangers of nuts, I googled the number of times cats have killed people. And aside from sitting on baby faces, cats haven't killed anybody. They're like the idiot, cross-eyed, psychos living in our houses, watching us, planning murder, and failing at it. But what if they got our razors? Would you let your cat shave you?